


Ships in the Night

by BairnSidhe



Series: Bodies-verse [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Budapest, Clint Barton Is The Adultier Adult, Emotional Baggage, Escape from Red Room, F/M, Families of Choice, Human Disaster Clint Barton, Medical Procedures, Mental Health Issues, More Issues Than a Comic Shop, Natasha Romanov Is Not A Robot, Other, Protective Natasha Romanov, Reproductive Issues, SHIELD-standard violence, Trust Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-30
Updated: 2017-06-01
Packaged: 2018-11-06 18:00:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 14,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11041377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BairnSidhe/pseuds/BairnSidhe
Summary: Before the Avengers, there was HERO.Before Hawkeye, there was Clint.Before Nat-Nat, there was Natasha.  Nathalie.  Talia.  Natka.  Trainee Sixteen.Before a lot of things, there was Budapest, and two people learning to fit their jagged edges together.





	1. Budapest, July, 1995

**Author's Note:**

> This is a part of Bodies-Verse canon. It doesn't need to be read within the Bodies series, but it would help.

Talia set her purse down deliberately on the bare kitchen table.  She hated her Budapest safe house, and that was why she was here.  Everyone knew she hated her Budapest safe house, so nobody would look there until she’d found her way to a new place.  The apartment was barren of all forms of decor, comfort, or signs of human habitation.

She carefully paced the perimeter of the main room, checked the cabinets with two fingers on the handles and a gun in her hand, and moved to secure the bathroom.  In the tiny, dirty, cracked tile room, she found something that nearly stopped her heart.

A napkin.

It was a paper napkin, the brown kind that comes with fast food orders, sitting in the trash bin.  Talia never in her life would have brought home anything that came from a place that gave out paper napkins.  She never would have brought home anything identifying.  Her safe house suddenly felt much less safe.

Kneeling, she lifted the crumpled paper with a pencil she’d tucked into her hair.  Unwrapping it, Talia held her heart in her throat, knowing a message might lay within, a message that she would no doubt hate.  As she pulled down the edges, a red smear caught her eye.   _ Far too bright to be blood _ , she thought to herself,  _ and it doesn’t smell of poisons.  It smells like… tomato sauce.  _  Sure enough, the napkin’s printed logo told her it was from a pizzeria nearby, and the red stain was obviously from a slice that had an unfortunate brush with her bathroom floor, since there was also a large chunk of melted and solidified cheese in the discarded paper.

“Who breaks into someone’s home to eat pizza?  Who throws out only part of the slice that hits a floor this dirty?  And who in their right mind orders pizza with processed meat toppings in a neighborhood like  _ this _ ?”

She wasn’t getting any more answers crouching in her bathroom, so she stood and dropped the paper in the toilet to flush away any evidence.  She’d sleep with an extra gun tonight, and look into moving some funds around so she could cleanly set up a new safe house.  Maybe in Cyprus.  Nobody paid any attention to shady real estate deals in Cyprus, and there were plenty of Russian-speakers in Limassol for her to blend in with.

Late that night, a slight scuffing sound woke her.  Tucking her back-up pistol into her nightgown’s matching thigh holster and tying long, scarlet hair out of her face, Talia slipped on silent feet from her bedroom to the main room.  A figure was unpacking a case onto her kitchen counter, and she pulled her gun.

“What the hell are you doing in my apartment?” she demanded.

“Aww futz,” the man said, shoulders slumping.  “I thought it was vacant.  All my intel said you weren’t going to be back until next week, and here I am setting up a sniper nest to eliminate a terrorist target.  Talk about awkward.”

“Terrorist?  Which of my neighbors is a terrorist?”

“Zareh Kazarian, he heads the explosives division of the Armenian Mob in Europe, and he’s wanted for about seventeen different mass casualty bombings.  I’m here because he blew up a storefront that an undercover sting was launching out of and killed two agents.  They weren’t friends, but they were good people, and we don’t take death in the family well.”

Talia’s heart stuttered.  His dark tone when he talked about a death in the family reminded her of the good days with Zima.

“I will help you,” she decided.  “Kazarian takes reasonable anti-sniper precautions, but he finds me attractive.  It makes him sloppy.  Do you need him dead like a message or just dead?”

The man gaped.  “Woah.  Woah there, lady,” he protested, waving his hands.  “I can’t go involving a civilian!  It’s bad enough you came home in the middle of the operation, my bosses will have my head if I make you take the shot.”

“You make me do nothing,” Talia said abruptly, moving threateningly into his personal space.  “Nobody will ever _ make  _ me do anything, ever again.  I can choose for myself.  Leave, before I make you leave.”

He left, which made her nod in satisfaction.  Smart man.

<^>

Clint sighed as he pulled the rolling golf bag that held the tools of his trade back to the safehouse.  Phil would not be happy about this.  He should never have trusted that intel on N. Rasputin’s schedule.  The new analyst was too chummy with the less than mature side of STRIKE, although he probably shouldn’t assume they purposefully passed him bad intel.  Bad intel right now could have gotten him shot.  It almost  _ did _ .

“Hawkeye?”

“Hey Phil,” he said to his handler as he slumped into the room.

“You’re sort of down, did the nest setup not work?  I can call location operations if you need me to,” the older man offered.  Phil was good to him, treating Clint like a human being and not some sharp-shooting cryptid with magic bullet powers.

“I got seen,” Clint admitted.  “N. Rasputin?  The owner of the apartment they sent me to?  Came home early.”  He set his bag down carefully before turning to grab his stress darts and starting to hurl them viciously at the target he’d set up.  Maybe he should get several and try making each one have a letter.  He could spell out FUCK YOU OPERATIONS PLANNING.  No, that was too long.

“What?” Phil gaped.  “That can’t be right.  I only agreed to stay behind because you were only going to be going someplace nobody would be.”

“Phil,” Clint said cautiously.  “You have a broken wrist.  You shouldn’t be within five blocks of me while I work right now, you know I’m Collateral Damage Man.”

“That name is strictly forbidden and you know it,” Phil scolded him.  Clint sighed.  It was nice of his handler to try to make him feel better about himself, but he was a trouble magnet and made no excuses.  “I’m calling the ops planning team, this should not have happened.  A civilian getting in the way of an operation is unacceptable, and that’s on them.”

“I’m not sure she’s a civilian, sir,” Clint said quietly.  He knew Phil wasn’t mad at him.  He did, really, and even when Phil was mad at him, it wasn’t something to be scared of.  That didn’t stop the crawling fear running up his spine.  Fortunately, after the years they spent together, The tiny shift in his words and tone told Phil to cool it.

“Sorry Clint,” his handler said, “I should have asked.  What were your impressions?”  After the first time, when the apology set Clint off worse than the anger, Phil found ways around it.  Apologizing for something other than the anger worked well, usually.

“She was… hard.  Cold.  She’s been hurt too often, and she doesn’t trust easily, but she has someone she does trust.”

“Oh?”  It was all the prompt he needed.  Clint wasn’t like Phil, the answers coming to him in spools of information, linear and sensible.  He watched though.  Even if it came out jumbled, he did see things the other man missed.  And wasn’t it amazing his boss wanted to hear what he had to say?

“She was already there when I got there tonight, but she wasn’t there earlier.  She’s the kind of lady who sleeps in red silk and a thigh holster, they do not just stay someplace that’s already been breached.”

“I hesitate to ask, but… how do you know that?”

“Morse sleeps in black silk and a thigh holster.  There isn’t much difference except a redhead sleeping in red silk has a lot more faith in her lingerie maker,” Clint told him.  “Would Bobbi ever come home to see signs of a break in and then take a nap?”

“Only if she was far too tired to keep going, and she’d probably call for a back-up… which you think Ms. Rasputin did.”

“Maybe.  Either she did that, or she’s so used to having someone with her, that she forgot in a moment of weakness.  Bobbi wouldn’t, but Bobbi’s not the only silk-and-ammo lady we know.  Melinda also fits the bill, but she let Andy make her breakfast in bed.  Do you know how many tranq darts it would take to get Bobbi to let you wander around her kitchen and then come back in before waking up?”

“I’m very very certain I don’t want to know how you know this about Agent May.”

“We do brunch.  She can’t hold mimosas worth a damn,” Clint admitted.  “I’m not ashamed of gossip, sir, I like information.  That’s why I’m good at this job.  That, and the aim.”

“Fair enough, but we’ve wandered.  Why don’t you think Ms. Rasputin is a civilian?”

“Her stance with the gun, mostly.  And the custom matched negligee and thigh holster.  That’s… rather extreme kink for a woman alone, and I saw no signs of another human being in the apartment.  She could have had him tied up and gagged, but it seems unlikely a domme would allow a scene if the area was compromised.”

Well, there was one other thing.  He wasn’t sure if he should mention it.  He didn’t want this mess to spill onto her life more than it had to.

“Also… she offered to hit Kazarian for me, since she knew his schedule would be crap for a sniper.  Nobody thinks like that except… y’know.”

“Assassins,” Phil said.  He paused, weighing, and Clint watched him measure risk and reward.  “Do you think she’s a bad person?”

“No,” Clint said immediately.  “I trust her to choose well.  I don’t know why, but I do.”

“And I trust you,” Phil told him sincerely.

<^>

Phil Coulson did not believe in coincidences.  He’d survived quite well on not believing in coincidences.  Which was why he did not for one second think Zareh Kazarian had died of a heart attack caused by a long diet of rich food and rather enthusiastic sex with a beautiful woman.  He was willing to go with heart failure, the autopsy had been quietly shuffled off to a coroner who worked with SHIELD.  Considering the man’s tastes, sex was likely to have happened with the young lady who called in the report in tears.  Phil was very sure the mascara stained young lady with the burnished copper hair had  _ something _ to do with Mister Kazarian dying, but he didn’t buy the natural causes line.  Especially when Clint took one look at the station footage and decided he was urgently needed basically anywhere else.  Phil loved the boy like family, but the twenty-four-year-old sometimes acted twelve when he liked a girl.  Given Clint’s fondness for women who could probably kill him with a cocktail napkin, and his description of being held at gunpoint, Phil was pretty sure the facial recognition would have come back as N. Rasputin who offered to take care of the Kazarian problem… if he had bothered to send it in.

Phil wasn’t dumb enough to pass up the chance to start recruitment on an asset like that, however.

Slipping up beside her, he pressed a card into her hand.  It had one phone number on it.

“If you want to come in,” he said.  “Since the weather is chilly here.”

“Thank you,” she said in return, palming the card like it hadn’t ever been.  “But I’m ready to try a little cool, fresh air.  I think I’ll go back-packing.  Travel without an itinerary and carry baggage with no handles.”

“Fair enough.  But if you change your mind about that…”

“I’ll keep it in mind.  I assume you know a heathen who eats down-rent salami?”

“Yes,” he told her, suppressing the laugh her description gave him.  “Although he also can’t get salmonella, botulism, trichinosis, or… well anything that would punish you for those eating habits.  He’s kind of a miracle modern science has yet to understand.”

She stiffened up, and Phil ran over the conversation for what might have triggered her.  “I swear, I only know because there have been cook-outs.  Everyone got sick, except him.  We still don’t know much of why, even his doctor just shrugged and said ‘epigenetics’.  I know you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, though.”

Ms. Rasputin relaxed fractionally.  “Well, just try to keep him from eating on the job again.  It’s sloppy, disgusting, and will get him in trouble.”

Phil nodded and moved on.  She was an enigma, no doubt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translations:  
> Come in (from the cold): spy-speak for joining or rejoining a group after being on a mission.  
> Travel without an itinerary: not report in.  
> Baggage with no handles: not take orders from a handler.  
> Down-rent: cheap or badly made.
> 
> Notes:  
> Nat has just escaped the Red Room, as a point of reference.
> 
> Clint is in HERO, but not fully read in to all the intel at this point. He can spot patterns, like the STRIKE team having guys that have frat-bro mentality and not officer of the law mentality, but he doesn't know who all is confirmed bad.
> 
> Collateral Damage Man was a code name banned by the Manual. See ValkyriePhoenix's works for more on that.
> 
> Both Phil and Clint have a lot of tricks for noting and coping with problems in psychology. Clint because it's a survival trait and Phil because he likes to know what makes some people tock when everyone else is ticking.
> 
> Clint dated Bobbi Morse, Mockingbird. Melinda May is at this juncture married to Andrew Garner.
> 
> Phil's off hand comment about Clint's miraculous iron stomach sets off Nat's human enhancement issues. It's not that, though, it's just that he's almost killed himself on toxic food so often that now his system just shrugs.


	2. Paris, February, 1996

Clint groaned.  It was raining again.  He hated rain.  It fucked up visibility and made his fifty kajillion former injuries ache.  It also had a tendency to make traditional bow strings lose their tension and become hard to use, although he hadn’t used anything less advanced than Kevlar strings since joining SHIELD and his current string was an experimental ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene that SciDiv swore would replace Dyneema some day.  That didn’t mean Clint didn’t still feel the wriggling tendril of anxious fear in his gut when humidity went up.

At least Paris was sort of pretty in the rain, the misty fog that rose from the pavement turning the ten thousand fireflies of the City of Light into a soft golden glow.  He remembered the first time he saw Paris, right after recruitment.  They’d put him on the Eiffel tower and he’d never before even realized what he was missing in tiny, podunk towns… he’d called the lights ‘fireflies’ over the comms and flinched, waiting for the sharp, mocking laughter or the belt.

Morse had chuckled and called him a romantic instead.

Maybe Paris was worth the rain.

Of course, Morse kicked him out after he tried to make Valentine’s Day plans to an aviary.  She was still touchy about her new call sign, and he’d thought that spending time with actual mockingbirds would help… but she wanted to do that on her own.  Which was fair, the relationship had hit the rocks before that with an ill-advised trip to a carnival that he’d reacted badly to.

“Hawkeye, I’m going to regret this, but can you please talk to me?  Your quiet is not a good sign,” Sitwell complained.

“It’s raining, I tend to be quiet when it rains,” Clint explained.  “I hate rain, and it makes me all mopey and philosophical.  I get the melancholic fits.  Maudlin.  Mawkish.”

“I changed my mind,” Sitwell grumbled into his stake-out coffee.  “I’m going to the corner for snacks, you’ve got this?”

“Yeah, I’m a dreary emotional wreck, not incapacitated.”  Sitwell waved at him dismissively as he hopped down out of the surveillance van.  “If I’m not parked here and haven’t called in, I’ve probably moved to keep the street sweeps happy.”

Sitwell wasn’t as much fun to go on missions with as Coulson, but then again, the two had different handler styles and he knew some people preferred Jasper’s business-like 9 to 5 sort of approach.  Clint didn’t.  He lived and breathed his job, and Phil knew it and treated it accordingly.  He made room in his life for Clint and the things Clint found important.  He’d even gotten Fury to help set up a safe house for Laura and the baby when Barney got arrested shortly after celebrating his impending fatherhood at a bar and making everyone wonder why Laura wanted to make a baby with Barney to start with.  Jasper felt like if this was just a job to him, it could or maybe even should, be a job to everyone else.  Certain agents liked that.  It depersonalized things, as the PTSD handouts in the therapist's office called it.  Made it easier.  It also pissed Clint off.

He hummed off key to a song he’d heard in England, a surprisingly country sound that had floated out of a bar in the old city.  Their target was armed, dangerous, and remarkably dull to sit and watch.  He didn’t even know why they weren’t arresting her, she’d done enough shit to put her behind every set of bars there was.  Of course, with his eyes, only a super rush order on a serving of very dead could trump stakeout on such a notoriously wily target.  The lady had been running around active since escaping a secure mental facility in the late fifties, for god’s sake, she may be getting up there but it’s not like it kept her from repeatedly ditching them.

“Fucking Whitney Frost,” he muttered, aware he was copying the Director Emeritus and her feelings toward the target.  Of course, just then he spotted movement.  Following in the van was out of the question, too noticeable.  “Damn,” he hissed, slipping out the back, leaving the map of the city on the seat where Jasper could know he followed on foot.

Slipping silently through the Paris night was child’s play, but the rain made it more difficult, and he heaved a sigh of relief when he stepped into the smoky jazz joint behind the sociopathic blonde with Maggia ties.  He felt a gun press his side and sighed.

“I got relieved too soon, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, youse sure did, pal,” said the man holding the gun.  As per fucking usual, life decided to turn dramatic irony on him, Clint thought.  He was being held up by a cliche!

<^>

Talia, now Nathalie, frowned into her wine.  An otherwise lovely vintage had been utterly ruined by the discrete packet of some form of drugs slipped into it.  Frost’s organization was promising, but sadly might not be worth attempting to take over and refurbish, especially with the cheesy pulp-noir aesthetic everyone seemed to embrace here.  Even their front was half jazz club and half what looked like a warehouse.  Which was too bad, when following the trail of breadcrumbs left by those who escaped before her, Whitney Frost, now called Madame Masque, showed up as a bright and shining star leading the way.  The first Red Room deserter had worked for Frost, as had the fifth, sixth, seventh and tenth.  Of course, she worked for the wrong side, but at least it was something better than running constantly.

Or so she’d thought.  Signs were pointing more and more to this being worse.

“Don’t like the wine?” Frost asked, her phoney baby-doll voice grating Nathalie’s nerves.

“I don’t often drink reds,” Nathalie lied.  Her cover story would attest to that, Nathalie Romain hardly drank at all.  “Too oaky usually.  But I didn’t come here to discuss wine.”

“Oh, dear, I was afraid this would happen again.  You Russian girls don’t know anything about having a good time.”  Nathalie tried not to grab a fork from her plate and stab the insufferable woman in the neck.  For better or worse, she was interrupted in her homicidal inclinations by the same assassin from Budapest last year being dragged in.

“Boss, found this one sneaking around.  You want I should get rid of him?” the cartoonish gangster in the pinstripe suit asked.  Nathalie shifted her grip on the stun gun hidden under her blousey tunic top.  She didn’t know why the man from SHIELD was there, but she didn’t want to see him dead.

“Oh, and who are you, you charming gentleman,” Frost cooed, her attempt at seduction pathetically transparent and also somewhat repulsive.  No woman her age, even one that slowed down her aging in her prime, should sound like that.  The breathy innocent voice belonged on an ingenue, not a middle aged diva.  A woman that age could be sexy, but only by embracing her own worldliness and experience, the cougar-effect, as Zima put it once.

“Clint Barton,” he bit out.  “Special agent, zero-seven-three-one-one-two-nine.”

“Oh, so formal,” Frost cooed again, but Nathalie could see the dozen tiny tells not hidden by the mask of sweet indifference.  “Come now, Clint.  You want to be on my side, trust me.”

“Clint Barton, special agent, zero-seven-three-one-one-two-nine,” he repeated, looking past Whitney Frost at the wall behind the two women.  Frost tilted her head, and Nathalie saw the faint edge of a frown peek through.  This man would get himself killed doing this.

“Ms. Frost,” she said casually.  “May I be permitted to take care of him?  I can’t hunt right now, as I’ve caught a small case of celebrity, you understand.”

“Ah, yes, I do remember how that goes,” Frost said airily, “such an inconvenience.  But we must face the challenges, mustn’t we?  Yes, my dear Nathalie. You may have him to play with.  Just remember to clean up after yourself.”

“Of course, Ms. Frost,” Nathalie agreed, standing to glide across the empty back room of the cafe.  She caught Barton by a shoulder strap of combat webbing.  “Come, you and I will have fun together.”

“No offence, Ma’am, but I highly doubt your idea of fun and mine are the same.”

“You will be enjoyable,” Nathalie told him, pulling him along behind her to the room Frost had given her for now.  The sound-proofing was terrible, but they’d make do.

She firmly sat him down on her bed and rattled the handcuff it had been generously equipped with.  Fortunately Zima had convinced the teachers that the cuffs weren’t necessary for his girls, but Nathalie recalled older classes that were full of girls who needed them.  When she was satisfied with the sounds of tying someone up, she held a finger to her lips and tried a short, jerky motion she recalled from Zima’s secret lessons.  One of safety and wariness.  Barton blinked and tried a sign in the complex hand language of the deaf.

_ How do you know that?  _ she signed back in shaky ASL.

_ I’m deaf, _ he replied in slightly better RSL.   _ What are you doing here? _

_ Running.  I’m very, very wanted by many governments.  They want me dead or enslaved.  All I want is freedom. _

_ You’re looking for freedom with a deranged gang leader? _

_ I don’t love my options, I simply work within them, _ Nathalie told him.   _ She’s helped escaped Widows before. _

He blinked at her owlishly, but quickly dismissed whatever thought had made him pause.   _ If I agree to help you, will you get me out alive?  Preferably with her in handcuffs? _

_ If you agree not to tell anyone my location, I’ll help you.  I’d already decided she wasn’t safe enough. _

_ Agreed, _ he signed enthusiastically.   _ Here’s the plan. _

<^>

Whitney Frost was no idiot.  She knew Romain didn’t intend to join her.  She knew the woman had some separate issue that needed resolving that she couldn’t handle while in Whitney’s circle of friends.  She also knew that statistically speaking, the issues Black Widows had tended to die fairly quickly if the lethal beauties were given adequate support.  And who doesn’t love their supporter?  Love was so much stronger than hate when it came to binding together a family, which that dreadful Red Room had never grasped.  Whitney did, which was why her men followed her every word exactly; she made sure they loved her.

“Boss, I don’t know about that red-head,” Joseph said warily.  “She gives me the creeps.”

“Now, Joey,” Whitney soothed, “Nathalie has just come from a very trying experience.  We must give her time to find her way.  And when she has, she will remember who helped her, and one can always use another Widow.  The long game requires doing things we dislike, occasionally.”

“Alright, that’s why you’re the boss, Boss.”

“Good boy,” she purred, letting a drop of power slip seductive and golden from her fingertips onto his cheek, where it soaked in like water on a desert plane.  “You’re always so good.”

Standing, Whitney paced to her wall of influence, delicately tracing lines of thread and wire from picture to article to scrap of evidence.  This was the web in which she would finally catch Peggy Carter, the no-good chit who stole everything from her.  With Carter’s help, Stark would re-open the portal and she would join again with the zero matter, and now she was far stronger than Wilkes, it wouldn’t pass over her this time.  It loved her, the few remaining drips of it that kept her young and beautiful assured her of that.

“Whitney,” Calvin said gently.  “You’re scaring the help again, dear.  What have we said about not taking your medicine?”

“You don’t get to tell me what to do anymore, Calvin,” she hissed.  “Not since you  _ left _ me.”

“I didn’t leave,” Calvin said coldly, “you murdered me.  You’re a pretty, blond monster, and you always were.”

“Well, now I’m strong enough to be a powerful monster,” she retorted.  “And that’s better than an impotent ghost!”

“Boss?” Joseph asked.  “Are you alright?  It’s gotten awful quiet in Miss Romain’s room.  You want me an’ a few of the boys to check on her?”

“I’m perfectly, fine, Joseph, why do you ask?” Whitney replied, her smile stretching her face uncomfortably, but then again, beauty was pain.  “Oh, yes, we should make sure our guest has what she needs, but don’t send the boys.  They’re men!  A lady needs her private space.  I’ll go see that she’s doing well.”

Now, she knew what she was doing, and now she moved swiftly and confidently.  The warehouse certainly wasn’t the Ritz Carlton, but she could at least insure her guests had a nice time.  She knocked lightly on the door, calling out gayly to Nathalie.

“Nathalie, Darling, is everything alright in there?”

“Yes, just a moment Ms. Frost,” Nathalie yelled back shortly.  That cross behavior was unbecoming a lady!

“Nathalie, you are not in Russia anymore, we have manners here,” Whitney scolded.  The door opened, and Whitney took in the state her guest was in.  A form-fitting leather outfit hugged curves in inappropriate ways and the neat bun of earlier had been teased into a riot of random spirals held up with a thick black band.  “Oh, goodness no, this won’t do at all!  Come my dear, I’ll lend you a real gown, and we can brush your hair.  It’s so...vibrant, after all.  We wouldn’t want it all… disheveled.  What would the gentlemen think?”

Nathalie frowned, and stepped out to follow Whitney as the more mature woman spoke of fashion and movies and handsome men.  It was almost like having a little sister, not that Whitney had wanted a little sister, but every time one came to her she enjoyed it.

In the main meeting room, Nathalie stopped, under a skylight, which in turn halted Whitney.  “Nathalie?  You know we can’t have you change clothes here, don’t you?”

“I’m aware, Frost,” she said cold as her own arctic home.  “I’m also aware you need help and you’re not getting it here.”

“Oh, but Joseph does try his best, even if Calvin is nothing but a bother,” Whitney reassured.

“I’m not talking about your amnesiac lover or your dead husband,” Nathalie replied bluntly.  “You are not well.  You see and do things that make no sense, you cling to dreams long since dead and buried, and you haven’t changed how you dress or act since the fifties.  You’re ill, Whitney.  You’re ill and running from help.  Let me take you somewhere you can get better.”

Oh.  Oh no.  Not this, not from a Widow.  They’d always understood her need to find revenge on Carter and Stark and that colored bastard Wilkes.  They’d never called her dreams insanity, that was what Carter did.

Through tear-filled eyes, she saw the little British bitch in her stupid red hat standing behind Nathalie, manipulating her.  Her sweet little sister, now reaching behind her for a weapon.

“I won’t, I won’t let you join her!” Whitney screamed, tackling into Nathalie.  Strong arms embraced her and the earth left her feet.  Up, up, up they went, and when she relaxed into the strong arms around her, she was on the roof, being bound.

“Don’t hurt her, please,” Nathalie asked.  “She’s insane and dangerous, but she’s also helped smuggle my sisters to freedom.  My family owes her good care.”

“Of course I will Itsy Bitsy,” the man from earlier, Clint Barton, said blithely.  “Our orders are minimal contact unless she becomes a danger anyway, it won’t be hard to get Jasper to agree to giving her treatment instead of prison.  She’s safe.”

“And I owe you.  I’ll find a way to repay that red in my ledger, you have my word,” Nathalie said, vanishing as swiftly as she came.  Whitney whimpered as the man, now alone, spoke into a radio.

“Sitwell, we have a pick-up.”

“Barton, where the hell are you?”

“Murphy’s law loves me.  I’m on top of a warehouse full of sleeping goons with Madame Masque in a shirt that’s all sleeves.  She is, I mean, not me.  Can we get this going?  Paris rain is cold.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translations:  
> Melancholic fits. Maudlin. Mawkish.: these are all synonyms for mopey and philosophical.  
> Maggia: the Italian Mob of the Marvel comics.  
> Murphy's Law: what can go wrong, will go wrong.
> 
> Notes:  
> Clint has many thoughts on bowstrings. Traditional ones are made of natural fibers and get wrecked in too much humidity. Kevlar and Dyneema are higher tech materials that work best for professional archers or ones with expert skill. Ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene is a subset of the futuristic tech that bowstrings are looking at now.
> 
> Whitney Frost appeared in Season 2 of Agent Carter. She's been confirmed as the MCU version of Madame Masque, and I'm keeping her young(ish) in this by way of the handwavey effect of having the superscience gunk called Zero Matter in her once. She's a brilliant scientist and more than a little batshit. Her POV is a VERY unreliable narrator.
> 
> Whitney Frost recruited "Dottie Underwood" the Widow of Peggy's era. I'm spitballing and saying that escaped Widows often used the trail blazed by Dottie as an underground railroad of sorts.
> 
> As Trainee Sixteen, Nat received training in military handsign. As Natka, Zima's daughter, she also learned the Howlie specific codes that are used by HERO. American and Russian sign languages were also taught to the girls.
> 
> "Joey" is Joseph Manfredi, the MCU mobster who loved Whitney Frost. I'm making him a Hammerhead counterpart, and as such at this juncture has amnesia. "Calvin" is the delusion of Whitney's husband who acts like her conscience. Not that she listens.
> 
> Whitney specifically hates Jason Wilkes for being 'favored' by Zero Matter. She's going to use horrid language because one, she hasn't had a reality check since the 50's, and two, she's evil and she hates him.


	3. Budapest, July, 1996

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To Beth_Mac, ValkyriePhoenix, and the 17 kudo-ers.
> 
> As a note, this one is going to be a couple chapters a day until it's all up, so no teasers.

Natasha shook her head.  She was insane, that was the only explanation.  The Red Room had broken her mind in ways she couldn’t even fathom, or else trained her to default to suicidally reckless behavior after a year out of their control.  But something was fundamentally wrong with her.

Why else would she have come back to Budapest on a stupid, pointless, sentimental mission?

Sighing, she flipped her lock picks out and opened the door.  Inside, she set her burden down on the dusty floor of the empty safe house she’d discarded in her search for a new life.  Beside it, she folded into a cross-legged seat.  Breathing in deeply, she caught the scents of tomato, garlic, cheese and meats…. Wait, meats?

Her eyes flew open to the man from before ducking in the fire escape entrance with a box of his own.

“Well, futz.  This place was supposed to be abandoned,” he said, echoing his statement exactly one year ago.

“And which of my neighbors is a terrorist this time?” she asked.

He snorted.  “You, I like.  You’re funny.  I’m on vacation, actually.”

“Do you often break into empty apartments with pizza while on vacation?” she asked, genuinely interested.  He was a puzzle she had yet to solve, which was rare.

“No,” he admitted, blushing.  “I’m not usually even out of the States for my vacations.  But when I saw my schedule was free this week… let’s say you leave an impression.”

“My own stalker,” she said dryly, “I’m such a lucky, lucky girl.  Although usually the  _ impressions _ I leave are a bit more… literal.  And less likely to encourage obsession.”

“It’s not obsession, Miss Nathalie Rasputin or whatever you’re going by now.  And I’m not stalking you, I had no idea you’d ever come back here.  It seemed like the kind of sloppy and dangerous thing I’d do, not the sort of thing you approve of.”

Natasha nodded.  “I thought I was going insane, to feel the need to come back.  It’s not much, and I always hated it, but this was the first place I decided anything on my own.  Right there in the kitchen, I decided to go finish your job.”

“You were here on a Russian mission?” Clint asked her, curious.

“No, I was running away.  I’d already ditched my handler in Odessa,” she admitted, feeling drunk and wishing she could blame it on the unopened bottle of wine in her basket.

“So didn’t you make your first decision in Odessa?”  It was a reasonable assumption, but wrong.  Part of her wanted to smile enigmatically and flirt her way to his bed, to distract him from that line of thought.  Part of her wanted to kill him for uncovering this weakness in her.  Most of her was tired of running.

“No.  That decision was made for me.  By someone I trust to want the best for me, but still, someone else.  I got to Budapest on my own, I can plan, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do.  You helped me decide, actually.”

“And what is it you want to do?” he asked around a bite of congealed grease and polluted meat.  She wrinkled her nose.  “Besides mock the great institution of pepperoni pizza?”

“I’m not sure that is pepperoni.  It smells like when I had to eat rats in Guam.  And I decided,” she continued, cutting off his squawked protest, “that I want to hurt the people who break families, who turn something pure into something painful.”

He broke into a big smile, and it warmed her in ways she’d never known before.  “Aww, you want to fight for love and justice.  That is so very Sailor Moon of you.  So do you have a family?  It seems like a specific motive, and you referred to sisters in Paris.”

“I owe a debt, that’s all,” she told him bluntly.  “I can’t help Zima, so I’ll help those he can’t.  He’d like that for me.”

They sat in companionable silence for a bit.  Natasha could see the wheels spinning behind the purple curve of a hearing aide.  He’d figure it all out,if he kept asking smart questions and she kept answering honestly.  It never occurred to her to lie, though.  It seemed somehow forbidden in the dark, dusty apartment, moonlight turning dust motes into shafts of floating silver.

“Was Zima your lover?” he asked, and Natasha pulled a disgusted face.  She’d never been that sort of pervert, not like Yelena, although that thought made her heart hurt.  “Guess not.”

“Love is…” she struggled to find the words to describe how out of reach that feeling was for her now.  “Love is for  _ children _ .”

He looked like he’d been slapped. She wished she could pull back the words, but they floated there, hanging among the dust motes and the moonlight, tarnishing the bright silver of the moment.  “Clint… I…”

“No, no, it’s alright.  I’m just shocked to meet someone with as bad a childhood as I had.  We’re kinda rare is all.”

“Slava Bogu,” she agreed, pulling out the wine bottle.  “I can drink to that.”

Clint smiled and stood to get glasses from the cupboards.

<^>

He watched her pour the wine, a rich smelling merlot, whose color danced in rainbows at the edge of the glass tumblers he’d found in place of real wine glasses.  She was elegant and refined, even pouring wine into the wrong glass to drink sitting on the dirty floor of a mostly-empty apartment.  He blinked back a memory of drinking box wine from red solo cups with Bobbi in the back of some rinky-dink motel while they waited for a clean-up crew.  His roller coaster of a dating history wasn’t what he wanted to be thinking of.

“A toast,” she said, raising the cup in her hand.  "Budem zdorovy!"

“Bud-- budem zedro… eh, cheers!” he replied, clinking her glass.

“You are terrible at speaking Russian,” she commented after emptying her cup.

“I have a secret shame,” Clint admitted with a smirk.  “I have a bit of state dependant memory associated with what Russian I do know.  I can only speak it if I’m drunk.  I can always understand it if it involves words I know, but speaking?  Only like three glasses in.”

“Oh, so you speak like a native, then?” she teased, and his breath caught as her hair fell back from a laughing face that was suddenly years lighter.  “Go on, you pick the second.”

“To the nights we won’t remember and the friends we can’t forget,” he said, choosing a common toast at SHIELD.  The circus hadn’t really instilled anything resembling common table etiquette, so he tended to copy from others.  She chuckled while topping off the glasses, at least, so there was that.

“Vsem tem, komu ne povezlo,” she toasted, and Clint put his cup down suddenly.

“I need to know how you meant that, first,” he said when she looked at him.  He knew his voice was sharp, but there are lines he didn’t cross, nor let others cross.

“I meant, let us drink to the poor souls who weren’t as lucky.  How else can that be meant?” she demanded.  “The third toast is to the dead, or the lost, or the forgotten.  Always.  It’s to the ones who can’t be here.”

Clint sighed.  “Sorry, I just… you aren’t military, so I got nervous.  That one is…”

“I know,” she said.  “What about, to absent friends?”

“And may we be absent less than present,” he agreed.

“Mne ochen' zhal' ptitsu, let’s not think like that.  We’ve still got half a bottle, let’s drink to Budapest.  He we met, here we re-met, here may we meet again.”

“You have a liver of iron,” he commented as she drained her fourth glass.  “I’m going to drink to your health, you’ll need it if you keep chugging this stuff.”

“You western men are weak,” she said with fondness.  “You haven’t even finished two whole cups yet.  Come on, do dna, bottoms up.”

“I think you’re trying to get me drunk,” he said, half teasing, scowling into his glass, which he’d carefully monitored through drinking and refilling.  He couldn’t really afford to go too far with it, but he could probably get through one more glass.  “Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to tempt a recovering alcoholic?”

“Oh,” she said, perfectly colored red lips forming a perfect ‘o’ of surprise.  “You hide that very well.  I guess I can finish the bottle, it’s not like I wasn’t planning to drink it on my own when I bought it.  What shall I drink to?”

Clint thought, and snagged one from when they had a Russian strongman in the carnival.  “Za nashikh prekrasnykh tsarits!”

“You’ll start to gather flies,” she said with a moue of distaste, “if you keep spilling all that honey everywhere.  And there’s only one woman here.”

“I didn’t say women, now did I?” Clint countered.  “Am I not also allowed to be a queen?  I rock the drag looks, I’ll have you know.”  

She laughed and he called it good.

<^>

Laura Barton tapped her foot impatiently as she waited for Clint to pick up.  Or rather his voicemail to take the call again.  And because he was a dick, his voicemail had no message, leaving her to wait silently for the beep and click that signalled recording.

“Clinton Francis Barton,” she screamed, the second the line took up.  “I swear to little baby Jesus if you do not come home the instant you get this, I am naming this baby Quintin.”

“Don’t do that to an innocent,” a sweet, feminine voice told her.  “What did the detka ever do to you?”

“Who is this, and why do you have Clint’s phone?” Laura demanded, her gut suddenly cold from fear.  Clint was her land-line in all this, the one who got her declared legally his next of kin so she could draw his government insurance, the one who took her to doctor’s visits and lamaze classes and generally acted like the dad-to-be that his no good brother should have been.  But Clint, for all his stability, had a dangerous job and she knew it.

“Relax, Molodaya Mat', I’m no threat to you.  I’m just a friend.  He estimated his tolerance for Russian wine wrong, though and is currently very good friends with my toilet.  Can I pass him a message?”

Laura sighed and let herself return to normal as the baby kicked her bladder again.  “I need him to come home, I’m not… something is going wrong and the nearest hospital is an hour and a half of dirt roads away.  I can’t do this alone.”

The Russian woman said nothing and Laura began to cry.

“Hold on, moya sladkaya ptitsa,” she finally said.  “He’s coming.  Call your emergency services, but he’ll be there.”

Five hours later, Clint ran into Laura’s hospital room, wild eyed and frantic.

“Sir,” one of the doctors said, “you can’t go in there unless you’re the father.”

“That’s my sister, you bag of moldy dicks,” Clint swore.  “I’m going in there.”

A slim redhead grabbed the protesting doctor by the shoulder and Laura could see him go pasty as pale fingers squeezed.  “We will let the family be together now, da?” she said, in no way implying it was a question.

“Laura, what the hell happened?” Clint asked, and Laura forgot the drama outside.

“Preeclampsia, a blood pressure problem,” she started, her voice thin.  “They don’t know if he’ll make it, since they had to induce early.  I’m sorry you weren’t here, I could have used the coaching.”

“Laura, if I’d known you were going to go into labor, I never would have gone overseas.  I promise we will get through this.”

“I know, Clint… and I don’t blame you, who would have thought I’d be giving birth at seven and a half months?”

“You are a fairly impatient woman,” he teased, and she swatted him.  “What do you need?”

“Distract me.  Who’s the hottie with the red hair?”

“Oh, that’s Nat… wait, where’d she go?” he asked, looking around.  “Damn woman is like Cinderella in better fitting footwear.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translations:  
> Slava Bogu: Thank God.  
> Budem zdorovy: Cheers.  
> Vsem tem, komu ne povezlo: To all the ones who weren't as lucky.  
> Mne ochen' zhal' ptitsu: Literally, I feel so sorry for the birds. It's used to say "stop being so sad, let's be happy".  
> Do dna: To the bottom. Used to encourage someone who's being slow in drinking.  
> Za nashikh prekrasnykh tsarits: To our beautiful queens.  
> Detka: Kid.  
> Molodaya Mat': Little Mother.  
> Moya sladkaya ptitsa: my sweet bird.
> 
> Notes:  
> Sailor Moon was big in the US in the 90's. Also, Clint just likes animated television.
> 
> Russia has an extensive list of rules for toasting and drinking. Nat follows them here, including the third toast being to the dead. Her family adds the 'lost and forgotten' part to that because some of their absentee members aren't dead, just missing.
> 
> Clint isn't a recovering alcoholic, but he'll sometimes say he is to avoid having to drink too much. His Dad being an abusive drunk made him leery of ever drinking too much.
> 
> In the comics, Clint had an older son that would have been born in 1996. In the movies, he and Laura got married sometime in the 90's. With how I messed with it, that would place Laura's first pregnancy and her marriage to Barney in 1996, but Cooper isn't born for another decade. Everything that can fuck up Clint tends to happen, and this is the first vacation from SHIELD he's taken for himself and not for another person, so... I went there. I'm sorry.


	4. Lima, April, 1997

“We have got to stop meeting like this,” the man in the balaclava said to the woman in the shimmery gold pashmina.  “People will talk.”

“People always talk,” she replied, dropping to her knees in her flowing sundress to work the catch on the magazine of her gun.  “I’m out.”

He tossed her a fresh clip, which she caught as the old one hit the ground.  He covered her as she reloaded, only to duck down as she stood and resumed firing.  Behind them, a Japanese diplomat quietly assumed they’d been partners for years.  He wasn’t so much wrong, as he was taking the truth out of context, but the two fighters standing at 45 degree angles to each other, effectively covering each other and their charge, didn’t mind.  They would’ve probably agreed with his assessment.

“There’s a safe house two blocks from here,” the woman told the men.  One paused his fire to listen, and one leaned into the fear that had become his closest companion.  “Follow me.”

“What are you waiting for?” the man in the balaclava chided the diplomat as the exhausted and worn-thin courage of rescue finally started to snap.  One suit covered arm was taken in a strong hand wearing an archer’s glove.  “Let’s go!”

Through the streets of Lima, the fire color of the woman’s hair where strands have pulled free from her scarf danced like a guiding flame.  She darted past danger and flaunted herself to buy them a few more unseen steps, a careful game of cat and mouse.  Were the diplomat just a bit more given to poetry, in that moment he might have thought of the legends of Kitsune, beautiful women who were in secret fox spirits.

Were he more given to practicality, he might have recalled that foxes are carnivores.

They rounded a corner and the scouts for the  MRTA called to their friends.  The man shoved the diplomat into a door and the woman grabbed the man’s jacket and pulled the knit of his face mask down around his neck.  They pulled together for a short, passionate kiss that reminded the diplomat to call both his wife and his mistress when he was safe.  A scout scoffed loudly.

“Son sólo amantes. Estás paranoico y loco.”

His friends followed him in loping off away from their hidden quarry.

“Wow, that was… what was that?” the man said, as he hesitated to pull his mask back on, and she rearranged the pashmina to show an icy violet color instead of gold.

“A kiss.  You really did have a deprived life.  At least I learned what kissing was.”

“Well, yes it was a kiss, but… why did you kiss me?”

“Public displays of affection make people uncomfortable,” she shrugged.  “We needed to lose a potential tail.  Really, Yastreb, this is counter-surveillance 101.  Did you hit your head again?”

“No!” the man insisted hotly.  “Well… I’m totally clear for active duty anyway.”

“I see,” she said coolly as they step out into the street again.  Her gun came up as she checked her sight paths.  “Are you completely clear by your standards, Medical’s standards, Coulson’s standards, or my standards?”

“Medical’s,” he grumbled.  “But I’m clear for anything below third story by Coulson’s standards.”

“Why do I bother trying to keep you alive?” she asked nobody in particular.

<^>

Fury was pacing, and Clint knew that was  _ not _ a good thing.

“Do you care to tell me who exactly this is?” the Director asked, tossing the file down, open to a picture of Nat standing with her back to Clint’s as they clear a hallway.   _ The quality of the security footage sucks _ , Clint thought.

“Well, sir, I’m under the impression that we’re supposed to neither confirm nor deny the existence of Bigfoot….”

“Stop being a smart ass for one damn debrief, Barton,” Fury snarled, but it had the quality of a plea.  “Who is the operative who assisted you during the Lima extraction?”

“She’s a friend, she doesn’t like people who hurt families.  She tends to save my life a lot.  And…” Clint glanced at the camera and Fury slapped the desk sharply, which turned the red recording light off.  “And I think she’d be a good recruit sir.  She’s got skills, years of training in one of the best assassin factories of the Soviet Union, motive to help us, and she needs a home.  It’s a perfect win-win if we can get her into HERO.”

Fury blinked.  “Hero?  Barton…”

“Sir, I know you’re in it too.  You hired me for my eyesight, remember?”

“I hired you because it was that or build a better Super-Max and I don’t have clout yet to approve that kind of budget.  If you can bring her in, do it, if not… make the best call you can.”

Clint nodded as the light came back on. “I understand Sir, sorry Sir, won’t happen again Sir.”

“Get outta my damn interview room, Barton,” Fury said, scowling.  “And report to Medical, you walking disaster!”

“Hey, Barton,” a voice said.  Clint turned and nodded to Brock.  “Heard Fury was pretty pissed you used a civilian for cover down in Lima.”

“She’s not a civilian,” Clint told him, carefully choosing his words.  He didn’t know for certain if Rumlow was Hydra, but he definitely wasn’t with HERO.  “She’s more of an independent asset I know.  And I know her, if I’d tried to do that mission without letting her play and got shot, which seems likely, the next time I saw her I’d never escape a blanket fort cuddle session.  She gets like that after a certain amount of worry and booze.”

“Heh,” Rumlow snorted.  “I wouldn’t mind cuddling with her myself.”

“I didn’t know you were in Lima,” Clint said almost casually.  “I would have introduced you two.”

“Oh, I wasn’t,” Brock said with too much jovial cheer.  “I saw the tape they pulled, that’s all.  Real looker, your friend.”

Clint smiled, but the math in his head kept going two plus two equals banana.  The best picture Fury could show him to ask for an ID was bad enough that they could probably use it on a conspiracy theory website to cast doubt on reports of SHIELD involvement in the Japanese Embassy Crisis.  “I’ll tell her you said so,” he promised, thinking of how paranoid Nat could be and how grateful she’d seemed when he flat out told her where his biases lay.  She would appreciate the heads up.

<^>

“You went off mission, Romanova,” her employer of the moment chided.  “I hired you because you billed yourself as a professional.”

“I got your job done,” Natasha spat.  She despised double dealers.  Unless she was taking them for every cent and every secret they had, of course.  The greedy were so easy to scam it was almost sad.  “I do the job.  I get paid.  That’s what a professional is.”

“You were seen consorting with an agent of the law,” the middle man growled.  “That doesn’t inspire much confidence in your discretion, and my employer wants to ensure secrecy.  I’m sorry, Miss Romanova, but as they say in Russia, do svidaniya.”

She sighed as the gun came out, and slid into a defensive stance as it took aim.  Her body flowed, like a river or a silk scarf snapping in the breeze.  Her grace was trained, taught, drilled and drummed into every inch of her childhood; it wasn’t something innate, but it was the next best thing as she avoided the shots and closed in on the shooter.  His hand broke easily enough in her grip, his arm ripped free from it’s socket in a satisfying pop as her legs twisted him to the floor.  He coughed a laugh and let a small cylinder drop from his fingers.  She grabbed it and twisted the cap off the timer and poured nail polish on it, buying time before the following explosion could kill them.

Her nails left red gouges on his arm as she dragged him away from the meeting place.  He was out of it, rambling through the pain, but she wasn’t going to leave him to die.  Not because she cared, because she needed to pass on a message.  Luckily, waterproof makeup works on the body too, because soon, her message was picked out in purple eyeliner.

TURN TURN TURN

YOU TURN ON ME

I’LL TURN ON YOU

TURN THE GLASS

AND START RUNNING

She sacrificed a half dead lip-liner to the cause, drawing a red hourglass, sand filtering slowly to the bottom, a spider’s web in black lines of liquid kohl behind it.  He sighed and the air whistled brokenly through half-clenched teeth.

“You should know better than to try to pay me in lead when I bartered for silver,” she told him disdainfully.  “I’m still Russian, after all.  I don’t have much patience for that.”

“May God and the Devil both turn their backs and you wander forever,” he spat.

“Lord, throw some brains from the heavens,” she countered, wiping her hands on an antiseptic cloth.  “Or stones, as long as you don’t miss.”

She was getting tired of this life, of the running and the backstabbing and never knowing who she could trust.  Not for the first time, she looked back on the offer to come in from the cold with a kernel of regret.  But the offer had likely faded, and her history didn’t inspire much faith in the hearts of good people, and acceptance of that history didn’t inspire much faith in her as to the goodness of the people who would look past it.  Maybe when she’d just escaped, when she could blame all the nasty, bloody things she did, the screams she heard at night, the red in her ledger, on the Red Room, but not now.  Not now that her nightmares were pulling from things she’d done of her own free will.

There was just no way to balance out that much red.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translations:  
> Pashmina: type of scarf.  
> (Spanish) Son sólo amantes. Estás paranoico y loco: It's just lovers. You're paranoid and crazy.  
> (Russian) Yastreb: Hawk  
> Super-Max: maximum security prison.  
> (Russian) Do svidanya: bye.
> 
> Notes:  
> Technically, Nat's line about throwing brains is German, but in that family Germany, Russia, and America all play a part. It's a part of what makes her the complex sort of woman she is.


	5. Budapest, July, 1997

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Love Fest! To Tsita, quadrad, ValkyriePhoenix, nemohana, Shadows_of_Shemai, and the 14 new kudo-ers.

“I brought mocktail ingredients,” Clint sang as he ducked in from the fire escape.  “You bested me with booze, but I shall prevail in the drinking of virgin daiquiris and tequila-less sunrises.”

“You are a strange man,” Natasha said, laughing.  She’d resisted returning to Budapest, surely they’d said and done what was needed last year, but her feet had carried her to a train and her hands had paid for a ticket to the town she was rapidly starting to associate with bad choices that led to pleasant consequences.  She unpacked her cargo from a thermal bag, layers of containers of various foods.  “It is good I am a fairly strange woman.”

“You’re an awesome woman, that’s what you are,” Clint told her.  “Laura sends her regards, and a quilt.”

“A quilt?” Natasha asked, her head tilting in bemusement.  “What on earth possessed her to send me a quilt?”

“You know in old movies about gangsters, the don makes people kiss his ring to show they’re in?  Laura makes people take quilts.  You’re family now, as far as she’s concerned, and you’ll have a quilt.  It’s made out of recycled bits of clothing from the family, pillowcases from a bedding set she’s phasing out, and a SHIELD standard issue microfiber shock blanket because my boss is scared of her and Laura could probably get away with murder if she wanted to.”

He handed her a package of fabric tied with a silver satin ribbon.  Natasha untied it carefully and unfolded a work of art.  She could see where the clothing was, and where the pale blue pillowcases filled in the background, but it didn’t resemble a box-bottom project at all.  The lines were curved, not straight, and the topstitching traced patterns like the edge of Japanese cloud prints across t-shirt soft pinks and purples, curling like ferns over the fuzzy green fleece and spiralling over lakes of well-worn denim.  

“It’s beautiful… but why would she make this for me?”

“Flip it over and look at the back,” he said.  She did, and saw words embroidered along the ribbon tape edging the blue microfiber backing that fluffed pleasantly around her chilled fingers.  They were in a simple Russian cypher, one she was reading as well as English when she was 12.

“Remember where home is,” she read, slipping into Russian, “and always know your family loves you.”

“Anytime you want to come home, Nat,” he said carefully.  “It’s there.  Take a closer look at the topstitching.”

She flipped it again, spreading the blanket on floors she’d cleaned for this very visit.  Spread out, it was a picture of a twilight over a farm pond, forests of velvet and fields of corderoy in the background.  The freeform stitching meant not everything was even, and there were mistakes, but some looked more deliberate than others.  A daisy of white cotton was cut with a mislaid stitch of red,and suddenly, it clicked.

“This is a map,” Natasha said in awe.  “To… your home?”

“Yours too, if you want it.  It’s the Isle of Misfit Toys, but it works for me.  Laura wanted you to have a way there, but I’m not happy writing down anything about that location.  I mean, for her stuff, sure, but only as the young wife of the town miscreant who’s serving time, not as the sister in law of the local spook.”

“I understand,” she said, “but I’m not ready.  Almost, maybe, but not quite.”

“When you are, you can find us,” he said simply.  “Now, what culinary snobbery did you bring?”

“I like food made of actual food, that’s not snobbery,” Natasha defended.  “Maybe I won’t share my mamoul with you.”

“Fig mamoul or date mamoul?” he asked, and she slapped his hand away from the tupperware.  “Okay, I take it back, you’re not a snob, you’re just high class and I am a lowly circus brat, please share?”

“It’s not a compliment to insult others, even if the insult is self directed,” she chided.  “Now go get plates, I also brought curries and a murder salad.”

“With or without actual murder?” he asked, twisting his face as he set out plates on her card table.

“Not made with, made instead of,” she told him, popping the lid to scoop out rough chopped vegetables in a thick red dressing.  Chunks of radish, jicama, and beet juxtaposed shreds of carrot and cabbage, big pieces of hand-ripped kale covered in minced garlic and chopped nuts filled out the rest.  “I got to use a big knife, therefore I didn’t kill the postman.”

“I’m so proud,” he joked, but she could see a level of honesty in his eyes.

<^>

Clint sighed and patted his belly.  It was good food, even if it had a distinct lack of three of the basic food groups, grease, salt, and refined sugar.  She’d brought it herself, made it herself, and from the skill involved in some of the dishes, had spent real time studying how to cook them.  It was reassuring to him that she had a hobby, for some reason.

“Is it at all strange that I’m glad you decided you like cooking?” he asked, glancing at her as she swirled a red-painted nail in her frozen peach bellini substitute.  “I feel it’s weird I get calmer knowing you have something to do besides work.”

“Well, my work tends to make people very dead, so I’d say it’s wise of you to think fondly of my non-fatal extracurricular activities,” she said thoughtfully.  “Is it strange I worry about your sister?”

“No, she was in pretty bad shape when you saw her.  It’d be kinda a dick move to not care at all about a woman who miscarried.”

“That was unpleasant, for all involved.  The detki…” she trailed off, seemingly fascinated by the garnish of mint he’d added.

“Didn’t make it,” he said.  “Too young, too small.  He has a plot though, and she got him baptised in case.  We’re both of the wait and see faith, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.”

“I… am sorry to hear about that,” she said, not looking at Clint.  “Losing a wanted child can utterly wreck a parent if they’re worth a damn.  If there’s anything I can do, let me know.”

“Of course, Nat.  Laura’s healing up alright, mind and body, but I’ll let you know if she could use a girlfriend who gets it.”

“I don’t really,” she corrected quietly.  “I was never given the chance to lose a child, wanted or not.  I only know what I’ve seen.  Children come and go in places like where I grew up, but there were people who were parents… they didn’t handle the going part easily.”

“Of course not, they were parents, parents are supposed to love their kids.  I mean, mine didn’t, but I’m aware I had shitty parents.”  He thought.  He did know sort of what decent parents acted and looked like, even if it was non-traditional and dangerous.  “The Carsons were pretty good parental substitutes, so I did get to see some good models, but I’m thinking that most human rights organizations frown on equipping ten year olds with live steel and longbows and putting them on horseback to entertain crowds for their supper, sooo…  There’s that.”

“I really think they’d frown on what I went through a bit more,” she remarked dryly.  “Take your happy memories where you can get them, Clint.  Trust me on that.”

“Do you miss your parents?” he asked suddenly.  “Which ever ones you think of as the real ones, do you miss them?”

She paused, her face blank, and his heart leapt into his throat.  He’d been banking on their truce of honesty in the semi-sacred space of Budapest Day, but some questions you didn’t force an honest answer to.  He felt his palms sweat and his breath come shallowly, working up the courage to tell her not to answer.  As the moment stretched on, he didn’t know what he feared more, her lying to him in this place where he’d assumed total honesty, or her telling him the truth.

“I miss Zima,” she said carefully.  “He… had been broken, very badly, long before I met him.  Sometimes he wasn’t Zima, but I always loved him, and when he could have love, I know he had it for me.  That is how I know he is my parent, because, while I know very little of real love… but I know that love is for children, and he had it for me, so I must be his child.”

Clint felt his heart shatter and fall away from the painful knot forming behind his adam's apple.  Such cold Aristotelian logic shouldn’t be applied so carefully to a topic like parents loving children, and yet he knew why she used it.  The night wind crept through the window’s gaps and she shivered, sitting ramrod stiff and isolated on the floor.  Clint scooped up Laura’s gift and draped it over Nat, letting her slip a hand around his legs, and sitting beside her under the map to home.

<^>

Kasperov nervously checked the phone again while getting in the elevator.  The new kinds had a way to send little notes, like a pager, and the client had one of those fancy tracker things on his target, but it was difficult to trust it not to be faulty, and looking again was reassuring that the assassin found the right place.  Budapest wasn’t a place you just burned down the target’s building and hoped you got them.  This apartment building alone had units belonging to no fewer than five people who could make the rest of Kasperov’s life both very unpleasant and very short if the hit got sloppy.

Needless to say, Kasperov didn’t intend to get sloppy.

The information had led to the building across the street, although street was a generous term for the alley that separated the apartment that the target was in from the apartment of the poor, unlucky man who lived in the place Kasperov had chosen to use.  The unwitting host had been knocked unconscious with a dart, there was no need to raise an alarm with an early gunshot.  The apartment he was watching was bare, almost empty.  A folding card table with glasses of brightly colored drinks half finished on it gave the only proof that the occupant wasn’t a stoic, spartan ghost with no physical needs or desires.

Kasperov blew out carefully as he took aim.  The man the assassin had come to kill crossed the window, carrying a stack of clear boxes.  The crosshairs centered and the killer took a slow, steady breath and slightly depressed the trigger, when a red haired woman with a stern but beautiful face took the stack.  Kasperov coughed and yanked the shaking trigger finger from the gun.

Some things weren’t worth any amount of money.

Downstairs, Kasperov pulled out his phone and dialed the client.

“Is it done?” the American asked.

“Net.  I told you to get me the information on the target first.  You did not do that.”

“He wasn’t there?  The trackers are infallible.”

“Oh, he was there, all right,” Kasperov chuckled grimly.  “He and his lover.  You didn’t tell me he was the prey of a Black Widow.  I know not to interfere in her hunts, that’s how people end up floating in the Danube with their ballsacks sewn into their mouths.  Find another sucker.”

“Black Widow?  I don’t see how one murderous housewife is such a problem for the killer I was told was the best assassin for hire.”

“Then you are a fool, and I want nothing to do with this.  That was no ordinary killer, that was one of Russia’s most feared agents of death.  That was Chernaya Vdova, and I’ve heard what happened to the last man to cross her.  We are done.”

“I paid you half up front,” the client whined.  Kasperov laughed.

“And for that I will not tell her you sent me if she tracks me down for peeping in her window like a pervert.  But money doesn’t buy you stupidity.  Don’t call me again.”

The mercenary had no idea why the American had wanted an agent of his own organization dead, or why he’d felt the need to contract that death out, but honestly, Kasperov could not care less if payed to try.  Any issue that brought you up against the Black Widow on your own aggression was by nature personal, and Kasperov did not deal in personal matters.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translations:  
> Mamoul: a type of fruit-stuffed cookie.  
> Chernaya Vdova: Black Widow.
> 
> Notes:  
> Mocktails are meant to replace cocktails as drinks, usually colorful or fruity ones like daiquiris or tequila sunrises.
> 
> Clint and Nat both use cooking as therapy, but they go at it differently with different results. Clint makes food that tastes good, because he's got a strong need t make people like him. He cares less about nutrition and more about the relaxation and the food-bribes he ends up with. Nat cooks to create a sense of normal to base around because she only has outside views of functional humans. She cares about nutrition because she needs to keep her body going with her mild serum metabolic boost and came from a place where nutrition bricks were used in place of real food.
> 
> Kasperov is an agender assassin and not a part of Marvel Canon. I don't care, I love thon anyway.
> 
> In the 90's pagers were phasing out in tech circles, but smartphones weren't yet a thing. Kasperov has one of the Nokia brick phones and gets texts which is Super Duper Fancy Future Tech.
> 
> A 'Black Widow' can refer to a killer who marries then murders her targets. In this case, Black Widow refers to someone much more deadly.


	6. The Sudanese Wilderness, May, 1998

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Love Fest! To hhhellcat, ValkyriePhoenix, QueenOfTheQuill, and the 6 new kudo-ers.

“Caw Caw motherfuckers!” Clint shouted, drawing the attention of the gun runners below him.  He’d chosen his perch specifically to draw the eyes of anyone looking for him right into the path of the late afternoon sun.  Several guards swore and dropped a hand from their guns to shield against the glare, which opened things up for Coulson to pick them off from the cover of the wagon of ammo to go with the pallet of high end weaponry they were selling.  He had no idea how a group of warlords came to be bidding on Stark Industries’ latest smart missiles and computer targeting rifles, but he had no intention of letting them keep the sale.

“Barton, that’s just unprofessional,” May said into his com.  “You have no idea if they’ve ever even  _ had  _ sexual relations, let alone with their or another person’s mother.”

“My apologies, May,” he said as calmly as one can when being fired on by many men with large guns.  Their aim was shot by the blinding sun, but enough bullets in the air will take down anyone.  “I’ll work towards more accurate insults.”

She laughed.  “See that you do.”

One of the warlords had the bright idea to make for the contested weapons, and Clint took the risk to jump down onto some barrels to get a good shot at him.  His gun jammed and Clint swore viciously as he swept it up into a club position and leapt for the warlord trying to open the locked crate.  A gun went off and his ribs burned for a second before the adrenaline of the fight covered it in soothing rage.

“We’re being overrun on the east side!” Hunter shouted.  “I need cover!”

“Morse, why did you bring him again?” May asked.

“We needed more fingers on triggers and I trust him,” Bobbi returned.  “Clint, can you get in place to pull the combo move we did in Malaysia?”

“On it!” he called.  He ducked and ran, tucking fingers together and taking a knee in time for Bobbi to use his hands as a springboard to get enough height to come down on her staff like a vengeful stripper, snapping brutal full body powered kicks at Hunter’s assailants.  They were stunned enough at her particular version of death from above that nobody noticed Clint releasing a bag of bomb-marbles.  She grabbed Hunter and hauled him behind a wall as the first attackers began slipping on the ball bearing shapes that now covered the flagstones.

“Cover your ears or learn sign language, folks,” Clint warned, thumbing open the detonator.  “Fire in the hole!”

The blast took out seven gunmen and left the ground covered in craters and squishy bits.

“What on earth?” May asked as she shook sand from her hair as she helped Bobbi stand up.

“I love SciDiv and their toys,” Clint said as an explanation.  “Christmas came early when they asked me to field test some stuff.”

“At least it’s effective,” she sighed.  “I hate how durable these jerks are.”

“We’ll be done soon,” Coulson told them.  “Focus on the ones still inside.  I want at least one that can still talk from each faction that was bidding.”

“Jeez, make it hard, why don’t ‘cha,” Clint complained, switching to hand to hand to limit fatalities.  “I hate punching.  Punching makes me tired.”

“You’ll survive,” Bobbi said calmly.  “Just help me tie this guy up and rest your weak little baby knuckles.  You big wimp.”

“You can be mean,” he remarked.  Their banter had taken a turn for the mocking after she’d hooked up with Hunter.  He didn’t usually mind, it helped him remember that Hunter was uncomfortable with flirting and it’s not like he hadn’t ever heard worse.  It was just that Bobbi didn’t always know her own strength, so to speak, and it was hard to explain why telling him his momma wore combat boots or threatening to paint his toenails purple if he fell asleep on the jet again was okay when calling his nerves over a potential hand injury wimpy wasn’t.

Interrogation was never what Clint would call ‘fun’ exactly.  He didn’t get that strange glee that Bobbi got when they decided to be difficult.  Of course, he also wasn’t half as effective as May, and the better you were at something the more likely it was to be fun.  Clint didn’t like having to go to a lot of effort for his intel, he liked acting on it more.  He let his mind wander as he rested out of the way, instead, watching the prisoners.  Lip reading was hard, but also rewarding in ways that interrogation never was, and it was fun to stretch that skill to cover other languages, especially when it was clear they saw him as dumb muscle too stupid to be spying on them.

Of course, it also got him unpleasant intel.

“You.  With me,” he said briskly, pulling a Saudi man in loose robes up by one arm.  “Where is she?”

“I don’t know how you mean,” the man said, smile wide and eyes too tight with fear to be anything but a lie.

“Tell me where you stashed your pet spider and maybe I don’t give you to Murder Barbie,” Clint threatened, pointing the man’s head at where Bobbi was slowly dislocating every joint in a man’s arm.  Nasty, he must have made a pass at her.

“To the north, five kilometers,” he said, suddenly much more agreeable.  “There is a small house.  She is in the basement.”

“That was lucky for you that you felt like sharing,” Clint told him seriously.  “But I’m not letting you go.  Phil, this one gets held back from Bobbi if she gets stab happy, I have other work in the area.”

Phil just nodded.  He often gave Clint room to work on things outside of mission parameters.  With their HERO missions, it was necessary sometimes.

<^>

Natasha spat filthy water onto the ground.  Over the course of what had seemed to be days but her highly trained senses said was five hours, she’d dragged herself from the dirty well they’d thrown her in.  It was a neat trick, bind her hands and force her legs to do nothing but keep her afloat.  It might have worked if she hadn’t been willing to dislocate an arm to bring her hands in front of her and then pull herself toward the wall of the well itself.  Now, though, her shoulder burned and her gut clenched painfully on contaminated water and a dying adrenaline rush.

“Na proshloy nedele ya poshli v Sibir'.  Vint vse eto,” she hissed between racking coughs.  Getting out of this cave would take reserves she didn’t have.

“Why did you go to Siberia last week?” asked a blessedly familiar voice.

“Fuck you, Barton, you know very well I was cursing,” she returned gratefully.

“Nat-Nat, be nice,” he chided.  “You want the emergency rations or not?  I brought Logan Bar Brownies.”

She perked up.  “With the real kind of chocolate?  Not the stupid sweet crap?”

“What do you take me for?” he asked, pretending offence as he scooped her up in strong arms.  “Of course the real kind.  I used semi sweet baker’s chocolate, oat flour and half the sugar that any normal human would need to tolerate it.  Count to three.”

“Odin... dva... uch!” she yelped as he reset her shoulder.  “Chto bolit, vy ublyudok.”

“Man you’re cranky,” he commented.  “But you did what I needed, so here’s your treat.”

The brownie was crumbly and bitter as she bit into it and Natasha moaned.  It was always amazing to her how he could turn a soft, decadent baked good that she’d otherwise hate into a taste of home.  She remembered Zima carefully shaving a D ration bar into dehydrated oats to heat with water over a fire on her birthday, and the bitter tang of the chocolate signalling that this was a special treat.  Those were good memories, and after their first return to Budapest ended with many drunken confessions, Clint had made sure to have treats that called back to those times.  It was almost enough for her to forgive him as he poked her numb and tingling feet.

“Stop that, it tickles.”

“Oh, ho, ho,” he laughed smugly.  “Not so tough now, are we?”

“Shut your whore mouth or I’m going to make a purse out of your pancreas.”

“No you’re not, I’m making sure you’ll be able to walk in a month instead of using a wheelchair the rest of your life.”

“I will make matching earrings of your kidneys,” she threatened.  “Maybe a nice intestine belt, although that seems hard to coordinate with shoes.”

“I’m sure you’re very scary,” he said as he helped her stand up and handed her a bag of clothing.  “Unfortunately, I had common sense beaten out of me at a young age, it was very tragic.  Take this go-bag as a token of apology, it’s my clothing, but it should fit you with some tucking in and belts and what-all.  Bye Nat.”

She ran a hand over the heather grey fleece lined sweater that had been washed to the point of cloud-like softness on top of the bag.  She could almost smell the detergent he used and the warm leather scent that he exuded blending with the chalk of traction powder and the green scents he carried with him from Laura’s home.  It was ridiculous, but at least she could blame exhaustion and injury for her fuzzy focus and strange fascination with his shirt.  Although it had been nice, to have someone come for her.

“Clint…” she started, looking up to find he was gone.  Well, of course he was, he wasn’t bound to follow her around tending her every need like some cursed knight in a fairy tale.

It still felt lonely.

<^>

Fury scraped papers together into a messy pile.  Paperwork was the evil he suffered for agreeing to take this job, but while he knew it was important, he would never ever enjoy making it all neat and tidy.  It wasn’t the first time he’d thought that, particularly as he worked to keep SHIELD and HERO separate.  Phil loved that shit, so did Jasper and that new girl, Hetty.  Maybe it would be worth the effort to make a whole division for handling the various forms and files that cropped up.  Of course, they might just make more of the damn things.

Fuck SciDiv and their empty promises of ‘paperless’ offices.

A knock on his door pulled Nick out of the trance of internal complaints.  His head went up and he smiled at his friend.  “Alex, come in.  You want to gloat about escaping the paper storm?”

“No, no.  Not in the least, Nick.  The WSC keeps me in plenty of paperwork.  I wanted to touch base with you about a possible threat that came to my attention recently.  A Cold War program ended recently, and one of the… call ‘em graduates, decided to take up a bit of freelance spy work.  She’d been pretty thoroughly indoctrinated, and even before that, you don’t sign up for a super soldier program without a certain degree of patriotic fever.  She’s a threat, and needs to be brought to justice.”

Nick hid his frown in a carefully neutral resting face.  People who ran super soldier programs were hit and miss with their motives.  The people who went into them however… were historically speaking not usually enthusiastic or even willing volunteers.  That got forgotten in the clamor over superheroes and comic book shenanigans too often for his comfort.  More than one white colleague had ignored the implications of the Erskine trials and been forcefully reminded by Nick why a bunch of black men getting stuck with experimental needles so a white boy could get to Europe wasn’t a shining moment in American history.  Alex wasn’t usually like that. 

“I can arrange to have someone look into it.  What’s her name?”

“What?” Alex asked, seeming surprised.

“Her name.  The thing people call this threat of yours.”

“The Black Widow,” Alex told him, obviously feeling back on track.  Nick frowned.  He could understand euphemisms and code-words, but he never got them confused with _names_.  It was a bad habit to get into.  Alex didn’t seem to notice Nick’s concern, which was worrying on its own.

“I’ll put my best people on it,” he promised.  That was easy enough.  His best people probably already knew her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translations:  
> Na proshloy nedele ya poshli v Sibir'.: Literally, "Last week I went to Siberia." Actually, "I should have gone to Siberia."  
> Vint vse eto.: Screw it all.  
> Odin... dva... uch!: One... two... ouch!  
> Chto bolit, vy ublyudok.: That hurts, you bastard.
> 
> Notes:  
> May has yet to encounter the thing that made her into the hard person we know and try to love. That's why she's a bit OoC
> 
> Teasing can be fun or mean, like verbal roughhousing. Much like with physical roughhousing, not knowing your own strength or not knowing where previous injury is on the other person can lead to hurting them where you didn't mean to. Bobbi doesn't have good control and Clint doesn't have good communication, so this gets further out of hand than anyone wants it to.
> 
> Logan Bars or D rations are a type of emergency chocolate bar to keep soldiers going on minimal food. Because they're meant as a last resort, they were purposely made bitter, dry, and hard, to keep soldiers from eating them right away. Natasha grew up thinking they were a treat, because Bucky and Darcy made sure she and her sisters had some treats, and D rations and their equivalents were the easiest form of sweet to get.
> 
> Natasha learned to swear from Darcy. It shows.
> 
> Some people like paperwork, like Phil. Some people hate it, like Fury. Almost everyone agrees that calling offices 'paperless' because of introducing computer tools was a cruel joke. It's never paperless.
> 
> In the comics, before Steve received the serum, it was tested on African American soldiers. Isaiah Bradley was the first person it worked for with no obvious negative side effects. America has a long and mostly nasty history of treating black people like lab rats and Nick is very aware of that, and the fact that white folks tend to forget about it when it suits them. Here, he's facing the fact that someone he considered a friend has shown signs of racism of omission, forgetting what is important to remember. It's even more telling that Pierce follows that slip with dehumanizing Natasha.


	7. Budapest, July, 1998

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes at the end of your rope is the beginning of a new story.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Love Fest! To QueenOfTheQuill, ValkyriePhoenix, Beth_Mac, and the 2 new kudo-ers.

Her phone rang and Natasha jumped.  It wouldn’t have bothered her if it was the doorbell, every safe house got hit by traveling salesmen and door-to-door petitions for charity or politicians.  The phone though, implied someone wanted to talk to her.  She didn’t want anyone even knowing she was here.

“Halló?  Ki ez?”

“I’m bringing a friend to dinner, you’ve met once.  He says you discussed travel plans?”

Her heart stopped for a moment.  She trusted Clint, but if he was bringing his handler….  This could go so wrong.  She didn’t want to mix their thing with work, even if they seemed to do that anyway because of how often their work went so sideways.

“Are you there?” Clint asked.  “I’m sorry, I should have asked instead of telling.  Surprising you was wrong of me.  I can have him stay at the hotel, we’ll work this out.  Please say something.”

“I don’t mix business and family,” she told him, woodenly.  Her fingers crushed a paper towel as she took deep breaths.  “I don’t want him here.”

“Then he can stay back,” Clint said carefully.  “I can’t get rid of him entirely, we’re technically working.  Shit hit the fan.”

“Should I get my toolbox out?” she asked, nerves over her own vulnerability switching to concern for her friend.

“That’s a very bad idea,” he laughed mirthlessly.  He sounded tired.  “I’ll be over in a little bit and we can talk then.  Just stay put and don’t shoot me when I come in.”

“I won’t.  Take the door, the fire escape is looking rusty and I don’t trust you not to break the rail when you’re this tired sounding.”

She hung up without saying goodbye and busied herself with finishing touches to the meal.  Her hands paused over the bowl of prepared blini batter.  Would the bad luck of making a funeral food be worth it?  She had made it with the idea of cutting her old ties and asking Clint to help her find a new life, but that gesture seemed ominous now.   _ Well, stop being an old woman and just make food _ , she scolded herself.  Luck never helped her one way or the other before this, there was no need to turn half-remembered superstition into phobia now.

The oil heated up quickly, and the batter sizzled and popped as she poured it, but soon became the golden rounds of buckwheat pancakes.  She flipped them with the same precision she used to target a strike with a dagger, each one neat and perfect.  It grated on her, so she purposely dragged the batter of the next one to make an egg.  That caught her mind, and she started trying other designs, crescents and hearts and a lop-sided flower.  When Clint knocked, she scooped the last blini, a misshapen attempt at a rainbow, onto the serving plate and went to answer it.

She held her body to one side as she put a hand over the peephole, waiting for a gunshot.  When no blast of lead came, she knocked the door five times.  She was rewarded by Clint’s two-knock reply.  Unlocking the deadbolt, she let him in.

“You really suck at ‘shave and a haircut’ Nat,” he said casually.  “I brought snickerdoodles.”

“It’s a silly tradition and I don’t want people outside of the circle of trust to be able to predict the code,” she told him.  “I made kebabs for dinner, but I’d like to have a cookie now.”

“Life is uncertain,” he agreed.  She joined him on the chorus of “eat dessert first.”

The cookies, as always, were perfect.  Clint had somehow mastered getting the base fluffy and crumbly without losing the coherency of the cookie itself, and Natasha thought small wars could be fought over his spice mix.  Her kebabs blended the traditional lamb with red and green bell peppers, chunks of onion, and mushrooms, although Clint ate them by sliding it all off and eating one thing at a time.  They ate in relative silence, the tension of whatever crisis had brought him here with a coworker filling the space that conversation usually took.

“So,” she said, too tired to resist the inevitable.  “What shit have you stirred this time?”

“Not me,” Clint said, but without his usual defensiveness.  Oddly, that convinced her more.  

“I believe you.  What’s going on?”

“I got orders from above.  A ‘dangerous rogue element, thoroughly indoctrinated and highly skilled’ has been reported to be running loose.”  He curled his fingers like quotation marks around the description.  “An assassin who graduated from a super soldier program in Russia.”

“And you’ve been sent to kill me,” she said with resignation.  It wasn’t like she blamed him, orders could be hard to disobey.  It still stung.

<^>

“No,” Clint insisted immediately.  Her calm acceptance of his presumed betrayal was heartbreaking.  “No, Nat, I would never.  I’d tell Fury to go fuck himself before I’d kill you.  I’d tell  _ Peggy Carter _ to go fuck herself, and she’s terrifying.  I was sent to, quote ‘bring the Black Widow to justice’ end quote.  There are lots of paths to justice.”

“I wasn’t made for justice,” she told him, fiddling with her fork.  “I was made to break things.  I was made to worm my way inside the hearts of men and rip them to pieces.  I’m not a black widow, I’m a parasitoid wasp.  You might as well get the bug spray.”

“I’m not giving up on you,” he told her sharply.  She looked up at him with wide eyes.  “I may have been sent to get rid of you, but I’m making a different call.  You’re just another broken child trying to find a way to fit in the world without letting all your jagged edges rip you up.  I know how that goes, but now you have a choice.  Join me in fighting for a better future where kids like we were don’t get broken, don’t face the same shit.  Help us make something good.”

“Wipe some red from my ledger,” she whispered.

“Exactly,” he replied.  “Come on, Nat.  Do you want to be a hero?”

“I want to be a human,” she declared.  “With free will and choices and the right to make mistakes and then the right to make amends.  I want to live free.”

“Congrats,” he said with a grin.  “You’re hired.  Let’s go tell Coulson.”  He knew he was jumping the gun here, but he didn’t care.  It would keep him from having to do something he didn’t want to, like fake her death or quit SHIELD.

“I’m not sure you have the authority to hire me,” Natasha said with a wry grin.  “Even if I decided I want this job, I don’t think you could offer it to me.  You’re just a field agent.  A footsoldier.”

“Oh, I can’t hire you for  _ SHIELD _ ,” he said, picking up his glass.  “But the Heritage Espionage and Resistance Organization really really likes it’s foot soldiers.  When you’re grassroots, each blade of grass matters.  And if you get brought into them, it’s just a hop, a skip, and a jump to working for SHIELD.  There’s some management overlap.”

“I trust you,” she said, playing with her wineglass.  “I’m not sure if I trust SHIELD.  I know where the darkness can hide; I’ve hidden in it myself.”

“If it helps, we know the darkness hides in SHIELD too,” he tried, hoping honesty would do the trick.  “That’s why HERO exists.  To sit beside the sleepers and keep everyone else safe from them.  It doesn’t always work, but it’s helpful, to know it’s there and stem the tide.”

She smiled, a dark thing with murder in the glint of her teeth and bloodlust at the curve of dimple she hid with a sip of plum soda.  “That doesn’t sound like a hero.  That sounds like a monster to scare the darkness.  I can be that kind of monster.”

Clint was about to suggest a toast when the door was blown in by a small bomb.

<^>

Coulson smiled as Fury rubbed his temple.  Clint’s antics were enough to give most handlers a headache, but there was something strangely satisfying in seeing the great Nicholas J Fury brought low by something as simple as lateral thinking.

“Sir?” he asked eventually, if only to keep Fury from silently imploding.  “You had questions?”

“How?” Fury settled on.  “How did your asset go on a simple threat removal mission and come away with two national travel bans in different aliases, a stack of reimbursement paperwork taller than my mug, five broken bones, second degree burns, a medal of valor from Lichtenstein, and a pet assassin?”

“Agent Barton has always done best in adverse circumstances, Sir,” Phil said calmly.  “And Romanova’s not a pet.  She’s a recruit.  Actually, as soon as I can get the right people in place to test her out of the class work, she’ll be a probationary agent.”

“I don’t want to know,” Fury said, sagging in his chair to signal that The Director was gone and Nick was in his place.  “I’m going to have to know, because I’m going to have to explain this to the World Security Council, but I really and truly just don’t want to know.”

“Would you like the truth first, or the spin?” Phil offered.

“Spin,” Fury said with a sigh.  “Let me internalize it.”

“Barton realized on the mission that Black Widow was breaking her standard MO in ways that made him believe that he could flip her.  He consulted with his handler, me, and with the time restrictions and the odds she’d turn on him if she caught him following her, I approved a mission objective change.  He made contact, established a rapport, and got her to agree to join SHIELD.  After that, several agents of powers unknown began to chase them.  Agent Barton, Ms. Romanova and myself attempted to call for extraction, but the communications were down, possibly from an electronic attack by agents of an unknown enemy.  We extracted ourselves from Hungary and proceeded by land across Europe to the SHIELD base in Marseilles.  In escaping, Agent Barton’s skills were required, two times which caught negative attention from the local law, necessitating cover changes, and once catching positive attention, hence the invitation to come receive the Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Principality of Liechtenstein from Prince Hans-Adam the Second.”

“Okay, that sounds enough like the crazy motherfucker he is to fit with Barton’s file,” Fury said.  “What’s the truth?”

“Romanova picked up the Kazarian hit when ops planning sent him to her apartment after she defected.  She also helped him bring in Whitney Frost.  They’ve been friends for three years and his sister plans to name her first daughter after Natasha, provided she doesn't just murder her husband when he gets out.  When Clint got the assignment he decided to try bringing her to justice by offering her a job enforcing it.  Agents of perfectly well known powers took exception and tried to set it up to look like she killed him.  Everything else is the same.”

“What are the odds that putting her on Delta will increase the insanity?”

“Very good, Sir.  But she’s also shown a high degree of control over how badly Clint gets himself injured.  He could have died in Slovakia, Slovenia,  _ and  _ Sokovia .  Countries that start with S seemed particularly dangerous this time.  I’m grateful she kept it to broken bones and some mild scorching.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Fury said slowly.  “But all three of those countries are before you got to Lichtenstein.  Where he saved the infant Prince Joseph Wenzel, second in line to the throne.”

“That’s right, Sir,” Phil said with some pride.  “Romanova’s insistence on getting him medical care before leaving Austria meant he had the crutch he used to shove the Prince’s bouncey walker out of the way when a bomb threatened the structural integrity of the stonework.”

“I was right,” Fury moaned.  “I didn’t want to know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translations:  
> Halló? Ki ez?: (Hungarian) Hello? Who is this?  
> Toolbox: weapons.  
> Sleepers: sleeper agents. Think SHIELDRA.  
> MO: modus operandi, way of acting.
> 
> Notes:  
> Blinis are tasty buckwheat yeast-batter pancakes sometimes served at funerals in Russia. The batter is thick enough that patterns are easy.
> 
> "Shave and a haircut" refers to a specific knock pattern that mimics a song, Shave and a hair cut, two bits" being the lyrics. It's a very predictable code.
> 
> Even now, Natasha expects betrayal because of her background. It's also hard for her, despite living it, to believe people will disobey orders. She internalized the expectation of torture as punishment for failure.
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> Poll:  
> Do we want an epilogue chapter? Tell me your thoughts below! Also, by popular demand, a short about Kasperov the Agender Assassin is up on my dreamwidth, go check it out.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find fan-girl stuff on my [Tumblr](https://bairnsidhe.tumblr.com).
> 
> You can find original work on my [Dreamwidth](https://bairnsidhe.dreamwidth.org/)


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